Topic “Scott McGregor”

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Broadcom made only passing reference to NFC during a conference call Thursday to discuss the company’s fourth quarter and full-year earnings, although CEO Scott McGregor listed NFC as one of the technologies expected to help lead to growth in the company’s high-end connectivity business.

U.S.-based Broadcom did not mention NFC in its recent conference call with analysts following release of its second quarter results, in which it announced cuts to its global workforce of 20% by exiting the baseband mobile processor business.

NXP Semiconductors said today it generated about $70 million in sales from its NFC chips and secure elements in the fourth quarter of 2012, up 20% over the previous quarter and three times the chip maker’s NFC revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011.

NXP Semiconductors said its NFC revenue fell in the third quarter, the second straight quarterly drop, though CEO Richard Clemmer said the Netherlands-based chip maker is “as convinced with the opportunity for NFC across the board as we ever have been,” and added that NXP would compete “aggressively” for the Samsung Galaxy S5.

HEADLINE NEWS

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Apple again reported a tripling of transactions for its payments service, Apple Pay, during its fiscal quarter ending in September, while noting other achievements. But the growth is believed to be off of a relatively low base, and four years after launching the payments service, Apple is still not releasing detailed numbers about its transactions.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – While mobile payments are rolling out slowly at metro gates and aboard buses in the West, Chinese mobile payments players are accelerating deployments of their services that enable consumers to tap–or more likely scan–to ride.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Major U.S.-based global networks, including Visa, Mastercard and American Express–hoping to keep transactions on their networks as more commerce goes online and digital–amplified their push for the Secure Remote Commerce specification, which is being drafted by their jointly owned payments specifications group, EMVCo.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – At least 13,000 buses in the UK outside of London now accept open-loop contactless payments, and more rollouts are underway as part of a plan by UK bus operators to roll out contactless on all 32,000 buses operating in the UK outside of the capital, NFC Times has learned.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – London transit authority Transport for London is proposing to extend an agreement with U.S.-based fare collection system vendor Cubic Transportation Systems to license the authority’s technology used in its pioneering contactless open-loop payments system.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Fitbit Pay has entered its 21st market, with the launch this week in Thailand with two of the country’s top four banks, Kasikorn Bank and Siam Commercial Bank, along with credit card issuer Krungthai Card, or KTC, supporting the digital payments service.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest financial institution, is pitting its planned low-tech FastPay payments wearables against Apple Watch and some other higher-end wearables using tokenization, as it launches a large pilot starting this month in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – A new smartwatch from low-cost Chinese wearables maker Huami and the latest fitness band version from Huami’s major investor and partner, Xiaomi, both support transit and retail payments–making them among the first budget smart wearables devices supporting NFC payments.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – A planned US$461 million contract to upgrade and operate the Clipper fare collection system in the San Francisco Bay Area will include account-based ticketing and a mobile app that will enable customers to tap for rides with a closed-loop virtual Clipper card on NFC-enabled smartphones.